Blake, we know, was not on the side of the angels.
It may therefore be tempting to take it for granted that he was some kind of
incipient historical materialist. Taking this for granted is precisely what
Paul Fauvet (RL 6) seems to me to do, since the question of the specificity
of Blake's production is never raised. As for the kind of possible sources which
Fauvet adduces, there is nothing particularly new about themthe same links
have been made by Bronowski and Erdman, Nor is there anything new about the
theoretical framework within which Fauvet (surreptitiously) works. The valid
insights of 'point of view' criticism are easily transmuted: 'point of view'
becomes 'ideology'. Thus Gleckner has shown that the point of view of the speaker
in 'Holy Thursday' (Innocence version) is not simply congruent with the
meaning of the song in the context of the two series of songs. [1] Add Erdman's
researches to this kind of insight, and talk about 'ideological apparatuses',
and you arrive at what, regrettably, will indeed pass muster as a Marxist account
of Blake.

So far, however, so good: there's nothing false
in Fauvet's description of 'Holy Thursday' or 'The Chimney Sweeper', unless
a theoretically confused description be sufficient to constitute falsity. But
insofar as this description stems partly from the tendency for Marxist Blake
criticism to turn into a 'study of similarities between Blake and Marx', as
David Punter puts it, [2] it may serve to lead us to the more seriously misleading
aspects of Fauvet's article. What, for instance, is the 'ruling class ideology'
which Blake unmasks; what is the 'reality' in terms of which it is unmasked;
and what are Blake's means of access to this 'reality'? (RL 6, pp. 25,
23) The fact is that there was no unified 'ruling class ideology': 'Deism'
took radical and conservative forms; conservatives might or might not be in
a broad sense 'Deistical'; Blake was always savagely anti‑Deist in principle,
but found common political cause with radical Deists like Paine. But then, there
never is a unified class ideology. And what sense is there in ignoring, as Fauvet
does, the hermeticism of much of Blake's writing? Presumably it would call his
perception of 'reality' into question. But he himself placed himself firmly
in the tradition of philosophical alchemy: he claimed six great influences on
himself, and two of these are Paracelsus and Boehme. [3] His relationship with
this tradition was critical and cavalier. Kathleen Raine refuses to see this,
and her readings of Blake are thus deeply vitiated; but it is useless to deny
that Blake was working, broadly speaking, in the tradition that she describes.
Fauvet is asking a difficult question when he demands: 'Do we really need to
have heard of, let alone read, Everard's translation of the Hermetics .
. . or Thomas Taylor's Dissertation on the Mysteries to understand The
Chimney Sweeper . . . ?' (RL 6, p. 39). The answer is hard
to ascertain; but in the context of Blake's work as a whole Raine's claim that
the sweep's soot 'is the earthly mire and clay that cannot defile the spirit'
[4] is certainly not as far‑fetched as Fauvet suggests. As for Blake's
prophetic books, only by some very purist notion of the text can one ignore
the hermetic and neo‑platonic connections they evoke. And by the way:
the contemptuous tone of Fauvet's reference to the Hermetics would hardly
survive a reading of Frances Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, where she shows the extensive influence of Hermeticism, not only on Renaissance
thought and art, but also in forming a climate for the acceptance of the hypothesis
of heliocentricity.

II

How may one begin to describe the ideological position
of Blake's texts? E P Thompson says, near the beginning of The Making of
the English Working Class, that 'Pilgrim's Progress is, with Rights of Man, one of the two foundation texts of the
English working‑class movement. [5] It would also be true to say that
these two books together can conveniently stand for a major contradiction in
Blake's work, which does lie at this confluence of politically radical rationalism
and politically radical antinomian Protestantism. Nevertheless, it is not accurate
to say, as Thompson does, that Blake felt himself 'torn between a rational Deism
and the spiritual values nurtured for a century in the "kingdom within".’
[6] Rather, he accepted only the political prescriptions of the Jacobins and
their allies, while rejecting the terms upon which these prescriptions were
based, in favour of more venerable, millenarian Christian ideas. But it should
be seen that such a position hardly permits access to 'reality', or to a complete
understanding of the forces at work in the period. We may find Blake sympathetic,
but his writings are as deformative of 'reality' as any that Macherey
might mention.

It is, of course, true that Blake's Liberty is not
the bourgeois conception of his poetic contemporaries. And Blake could not,
like Wordsworth, turn his back on Godwin and the French Revolution in one easy
movementsince he had never, in the first place, been a 'bigot' to the
'new Idolatry' of Godwinianism, or to 'the open eye of Reason' (Prelude (1850),
11. 77, 67). So his disillusionment with the course of the Revolution
took a different form from that of the rationalists: lie revised his religious
notions and hoped still for the new Jerusalem. But the revision moved him away
from the sense that a solution could be found within history: 'God send it so
on Earth as it is in Heaven.' And he became more implacable in his life‑long
opposition to 'Deism': the fact that Bunyan and Paine don't mix became more
obvious.

Blake's allegiance, then, is to Bunyan; or more accurately
to that 'underground' tradition of antinomianism which Christopher Hill sees
as surviving orally from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. The
survival of the Muggletonians, and the prophecies of Richard Brothers and Joanna
Southcott, support this view. Very suggestive, too, is the evidence that an
interest in Paracelsus and Boehme was very common among the Protestant sects
of the period of the English Revolution. [7]

Such a position ensures that Blake's criticism of
the Enlightenment is profound: his work moves insistently towards a sublation
of every category of Enlightenment ideology. [8] But it is wrong to see Blake's
work as unfolding an immanent structure which exhibits a perfect fit with the
silences of the dominant (but not solitary) reigning ideology. Blake's work
is not a kind of ideological anti‑world, since the comprehension of history
within it is necessarily partial and contradictory.

III

Such a view of Blake is an accurate and fairly flexible
description by class‑situation (Blake's artisan background in a particular
time and place). It is therefore helpful but inadequate. Blake's class‑situation
is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition that he should write in the
forms he chose. His class‑situation dictates the possibility that
he writes prophecies that are both alchemical and radical. It does not dictate
the form those prophecies will take.

The model can be subtilized, though: Blake's occupation
as commercial engraver moves him towards the middle class. Hence his use of
the Sublime and the Ossianic: Blake's Milton is not only the Protestant prophet
of Christian Liberty, then, but also the idol of the fashionable cult of the
Sublime. Blake, then, combines old artisanal and new middle-class political
and artistic ideologies: Bunyan meets both Paine, and Romantic sensibility and
sublimity. This is the best model of its kind, for Blake. But it only provides
the conditions of existence of Blake's work, relatively empty categories, essential
to explanation and description, but reductive if not filled out by a more minute
formal description which allows for the autonomy of artistic tradition. Bloom's
theory of influence (the struggle with strong, precursor poetsin this
case Milton and the prophets) suggests a means of doing this which would not
be merely Marxism‑plus‑New Criticism.

Again, the condition for the existence of the multivalence
of Blake's texts, and their terms, lies in his tradition: a tradition for which
the reigning clarity was really obscurity. Blake's 'obscurities' and multiple
meanings are attempts to reveal what is hidden and cannot be spoken. But I doubt if the play of Blake's texts can be reduced to a reflection of this tradition
and the way it was articulated with, and opposed to, Enlightenment forms of
discourse.

Blake's work indicates that ideology criticism, and conceptions
such as that of a mode of literary production, must be used with an eye to contradiction;
and provide the terms, rather than the detail, of description.

1. Robert F Gleckner, 'Point of View and Context
in Blake's Songs', Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXI,
11 (November 1957), pp. 531‑8.